


Feindliche Übernahme

by Ceris_Malfoy



Series: Sidus Ad Quirito Diabolo [4]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Shattered Glass
Genre: AU!SG, Alternate Universe - Dark, Creepy, Gen, Horror, M/M, PassivelyInsane!Starscream, Sadist!Ratchet, medical impossibilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-01
Updated: 2013-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-03 23:55:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/704102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceris_Malfoy/pseuds/Ceris_Malfoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Curiosity kills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feindliche Übernahme

" _Anger ventilated often leads to forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens to revenge."_  


Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

The seeker's continued survival defies all logic.

Ratchet begins swearing the click he sees the broken mess his commander's favorite toy is delivered in. It only takes one look at the seeker to know that he may not even be able to fix him this time – a mech could only take so much damage after all, and this one has been balancing on the edge of too much for too long. He nonetheless moves the seeker onto the only berth wide enough to accommodate the broken remains of the mech's wings. He values his life, after all, and even if Optimus _had_ ordered Starscream's death (which he sincerely doubted, not after all this time spent trying to _break_ the damnable thing), the fact that the seeker is still alive says many things, none of which are good if he dies while in Ratchet's dubious care.

So.

He carefully arranges the seeker's broken limbs, assessing damage (of which there is much, too much, really) and making a mental list of the repairs he can do and in which priority he should consider doing them. (Not that that is necessarily the order in which he would do the repairs. But it is a necessary process, as it wouldn't do to kill the mech he's trying to repair by accident.) He turns to get his tools and studies them intently, determining if any of his blades need to be sharpened or cleaned. Some do, and so he sets about the tasks.

The sounds of metal groaning and screeching and the clatter of panicked movement has him whirling around, only to stare in shock. The seeker has made it to his shattered, useless pedes and is nevertheless almost out the door, systems whining under the strain of stressing his wounds beyond anything Ratchet knows his fellow Autobots could survive, before Ratchet finally regaines his senses and quickly brings the seeker down with a carefully aimed wrench.

He has to _strap_ the seeker to the berth.

Ratchet doesn't understand it, c _an't_ understand it, not really. He's repaired the seeker so many times that there is no wire that is a stranger to his knowing hands. His optics have seen every inch of the former scientist, inside and out, and he knows that there is _nothing_ about this seeker that is abnormal for his frame-set. Despite this knowledge, he searches for his answers anyway, cutting open the seeker panel by panel, ripping wires carelessly in his search for truth. He tastes of the seeker's energon and rips through the seeker's firewalls, becoming more intimate with the seeker's thoughts and internals than any other mech ever could short of a full merge.

And yet he finds nothing which could possibly explain how this seeker lives when another would have been long dead. _Nothing_. He stares at the mangled frame on the berth, knowing in every inch of his being that the seeker should be dead, if not from his previous wounds than because of the one's he's just suffered. The seeker is splayed open, internals broken and shattered, his tanks and tubes emptied of energon, and his processor disconnected from the rest of his systems. And yet…,

… And yet, the seeker still watches him, optics cold and judging and so _furious_. Ratchet can see all the fires of the pit in the seeker's odd red-gold gaze, and wonders at it even as he instinctively shrinks back. He has met many seekers over the course of his long life, both of the Vosnian build and the Crystal City one, of red optics and blue, and never once before has he seen a seeker he's been more primally afraid of. If it isn't for the fact that the seeker is a broken mess and strapped down to the berth….

As it is, he quickly begins to put the seeker back together again, trying his very best to ignore the way servos with dull-tipped fingers – one of the many modifications done to the Crystal City seekers had made to help differentiate themselves from their Vosnian cousins – clench and scrape against the metal of the berth, digging _into_ the metal of the berth as if they bore the claws of his distant kin who are also long gone and dead.

For a moment, he stops his repairs and considers the seeker. Starscream is the very last seeker in existence, still as proud and arrogant as ever despite everything that has been done to him. Starscream has born their hatred, their fury, their disdain, and their perverse lusts, and aside from physical damage and an almost apathetic state of being, shows no signs of ever being as broken mentally as he knows Optimus needs the seeker to be. Ratchet himself thinks that this has all been a mistake, that they have done something for which not even Primus could possibly forgive or condone, but who is he in the grand scheme of things? He rather would have simply kill the seeker the second they found out that Starscream's internal firewalls were too powerful to override or bypass with viruses and alternate coding. Starscream would be useful on their side, he admits, but as it is, he wastes resources on the seeker's near-cyclical repairs, especially considering that he knows that the seeker will never give in, if only to get _some_ form of revenge on the one who started all of this.

Still, he considers, looking, really _looking_ at the seeker splayed partially open before him, still staring him down with optics that burn in the intensity of their hatred. His commander has only ever issued one warning in regards to Starscream's treatment: no one is to touch the seeker's ember. Logically, Ratchet knows that to break that order is to suffer worse than death, as Optimus Prime is, well _, creative_. But he knows that he has explored every other inch of the seeker, and has found nothing to explain why he still lives, proud and furious, when others would have long ago surrendered.

Ratchet is uneasy about his choice, but he nonetheless connects his systems to the seeker's, taking much care to keep their embers to peripheral contact only. He is breaking the only taboo his Prime has made given the seeker's treatment, but he _needs_ to know. But even with the care he's taken to firewall his systems, a tide of fury breaks those firewalls down as if they were never there to begin with, simply breezing through his systems as if they were as familiar to the seeker as his own. Ratchet rears back, attempting to disconnect, or at the very least, put some distance between them and their embers, but it does _nothing_. Beneath him, the broken, eviscerated body of the seeker writhes and something much like amusement-not-his-own is filtered through his own systems.

' **Silly Autobot** ,' a voice – a grating, deeply resonant purr that he can physically feel scrape along his systems – inside his head whispers. ' **Did you really think that you could so casually hack into what is mine?** '

Beneath him, the seeker breaks into laughter, voice a shadowy whisper of shattered glass and tearing metal made all the worse by the fact that his vocalizer is just as damaged as the rest of him, and therefore should not be working at all. The sounds that force their way out of the seeker's mouth are nothing he wants to hear; his flailing hands struggle to hit the emergency disconnect he has prepared in advance because while he may be sadistic and half-insane, he is no fool and something about this seeker has _always_ alarmed him.

He strikes the emergency disconnect over and over, but while he feels the seeker's systems leave his own, there is still the overwhelming sense of _another_ digging through every part of him. "What have you _done_?" he howls, hands scrambling at his chassis where his ember feels as if it is being shredded. "I will rip you into little shreds and hang your ember as my new ceiling light!"

" **I think, medic, that you've done quite enough.** " The voice is cold and sinister, deep and demented, and to Ratchet's horror, it comes from his own mouth. He stares in horror at his own hands, which have moved off his chassis of their own volition, watching – _feeling_ – the metal buckle and reshape themselves. The thin, delicate hands that are part and parcel of being a medic become thick and heavily armored, with sharp, savage claws and spiked bracers over the joints. They were the hands of a war-build, not a medic.

Worse still is the feeling of the rest of his body changing. His horrified gaze turns to the seeker, who is still laughing, still watching him with an amused glee that borders on madness. " _What have you done?_ " he shrieks out, even as his body is forcefully elongated and thickened with mass he never had and has no idea where it comes from.

The seeker smiles and stops laughing, but says nothing. Just smiles and smiles as everything that is Ratchet is taken from him, warped and twisted into something, some _one_ completely different.

The last thing Ratchet is aware of is the feeling of his ember finally imploding under the strain, and the last thing he hears is the sharp, brittle sound of the seeker's voice practically cooing, "Welcome and well-met, Unicron."


End file.
